New studies promote Arctic cooling fears

Two new studies have promoted concerns that anthropogenic global warming could cause abrupt cooling in the Northern Hemisphere – the “Day after Tomorrow” scenario.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald;

Two new studies are adding to concerns about one of the most troubling scenarios for future climate change: the possibility that global warming could slow or shut down the Atlantic’s great ocean circulation systems, with dramatic implications for North America and Europe.

The research, by separate teams of scientists, bolsters predictions of disruptions to global ocean currents – such as the Gulf Stream – that transfer tropical warmth from the equator to northern latitudes, as well as a larger conveyor system that cycles colder water into the ocean’s depths. Both systems help ensure relatively mild conditions in parts of Northern Europe that would otherwise be much colder.

Climate change can influence sea surface conditions and the melting rates of ice sheets; resulting in decreased deep water formation rates and ultimately affecting the strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). As such, a detailed study of the interactive role of dynamic ice sheets on the AMOC and therefore on global climate is required. We utilize a climate model in combination with a dynamic ice sheet model to investigate changes to the AMOC and North Atlantic climate in response to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for RCP4.5 and RCP6. It is demonstrated that the inclusion of an ice sheet component results in a drastic freshening of the North Atlantic by up to 2 practical salinity units, enhancing high-latitude haloclines and weakening the AMOC by up to 2 sverdrup (106 m3/s). Incorporating a bidirectionally coupled dynamic ice sheet results in relatively reduced warming over Europe due to the associated decrease in heat transport.

Proxy records of temperature from the Atlantic clearly show that the Younger Dryas was an abrupt climate change event during the last deglaciation, but records of hydroclimate are underutilized in defining the event. Here we combine a new hydroclimate record from Palawan, Philippines, in the tropical Pacific, with previously published records to highlight a difference between hydroclimate and temperature responses to the Younger Dryas. Although the onset and termination are synchronous across the records, tropical hydroclimate changes are more gradual (>100 years) than the abrupt (10–100 years) temperature changes in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The abrupt recovery of Greenland temperatures likely reflects changes in regional sea ice extent. Proxy data and transient climate model simulations support the hypothesis that freshwater forced a reduction in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, thereby causing the Younger Dryas. However, changes in ocean overturning may not produce the same effects globally as in Greenland.

Northern deep freeze studies seem to be fashionable lately, even Michael Mann had a go earlier this year.

Perhaps giant blocks of ice washing up on American beaches is proving difficult to reconcile with the end of snow narrative. Having said that, there has always been a low profile nod towards the possibility of abrupt cooling, which is of course still all our fault. This apparent effort to keep all the options open is beautifully captured by one of my favourite climategate emails.

In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media, which can become public perception. It provides a new story for the old news that is climate change – a story that has been running since 1985/88.

Last Friday, even NERC put-out a press release that opened ‘British scientists set sail today from Glasgow to begin work aimed at discovering if Britain is indeed in danger of entering the next ice age.’

…

Dear Asher, and all,

I think this is a real problem, and I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming. But somehow I also feel that one needs to add the dimension of the earth system, and the fact that human beings for the first time ever are able to impact on that system.

Let’s not forget folks, that what we are dealing with is “settled science”.

What this research seems to be really saying is…Don’t worry, Be Happy…in that a Do Nothing scenario will eventually lead back to a Cooling/Cooler Arctic and an advance of Sheet Ice. Seems kind of cyclical to me!!

Reread the article, in the first study, “We utilize a climate model in combination with a dynamic ice sheet model to investigate changes to the AMOC and North Atlantic climate … ”
In other words, they used excrement to the 2nd power.

Exactly Stephen, or more generally : hedging your bets.
There is a diminishing amount of data rigging that can be done at this stage. The “corrections” are down to a tweaking a few more hundredths of a degree of warming.
They are crapping themselves at the possibility that the next random fluctuation may be downwards, and without a good excuse like a major volcano.
By claiming all eventualities *could be” caused by global warming, even global cooling, they can then turn round and say : “this is consistent with what was predicted by global warming models”.
If you have enough models and enough bogus studies going in all directions, you will always have someone who can pop up and say : this is exactly what we predicted.
Crap science, good propaganda.

Stephen Richards
September 8, 2015 at 11:25 am
It’s called hedging and is apparently very popular in financial centres

Global warming hedging is not new.Global warming ‘Climate Change’ leading to northern hemisphere cooling andexpanding ice sheets is not new.
Your are of course correct. It is “very popular in financial centres” such as the ‘Centre For Guaranteeing Continued Climate Change Funding’.
It stopped being about science and became all all about money some time back.

So, during the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Medieval Warm Period, none of these warmer cycles caused another Ice Age, did they? Not to mention the very first Warm Cycle that ended the previous Ice Age!
This ‘study’ shows how utterly bizarre the global warmists twist history. It is utterly illogical. And they don’t care and hope the general public won’t notice this is insane.

Hey, if they can convince a large number of people that, on a planet encased in bitter cold and ice over much of it’s surface for a significant portion of every year, one or two degrees of warming will be an unimaginable and unsurvivable catastrophe, even for life units which preferentially seek out and thrive on heat and warmth wherever they can find it, then they could probably even sell snowballs to a Senator.

Good point! Most people who live in the industrialized West have become so disconnected from the natural biosphere that they grossly overestimate human influence. They are living a sort of “Truman Show” existence and believe that what they experience is the global norm. Every year in Florida there are city folk who come to visit. Because they have only experienced domesticated animals and pets, there are usually a few who get bitten when they try to pet the alligators they see. Yes, really…

You just have to talk to them in a manner that meshes with their values;

Attention Visitors, We try to maintain our wildlife in an as natural and organic a state as possible, therefore please certify that you are steroid, antibiotic and growth hormone free before being bit or eaten; thank you for your cooperation.

Back to square one! If the climate system warms, it’s climatre change! If the climate system cools, it’s climate change! Win win scenario! Of course it’s nothing whatsoever to do with vartiations in Solar output affecting the planet in ways we don’t yet fully understand! It cannot possibly be natural, you can’t tax the Sun!

Speaking of Penn State… they just lost their 1st football game to tiny Temple U. since 1941. Their football program has suffered since revelations emerged about the corrupt nature of the University system which allowed pedophile coach Jerry Sandusky to continue on for years. As everyone knows, college football brings tremendous wealth to universities and the powers that be at Penn State did not want to upset their lucrative gold mine football program. Now, the University is paying the price. The same sort of “he brings home the bacon” philosophy allows Michael Mann to remain at Penn State, since he is a huge “climate change” grant money magnet. Penn State is hardly alone in such grant- mining corruption, just one of the more obvious practitioners. Some people never learn.

That’s the false narrative of known fudged serial investigator Louise Freeh. Freeh’s PSU report has been debunked, just like his false claims about Richard Jewel and other Freeh Reports were overturned as false. The NCAA had to completely backtrack on all of the Sanctions against Penn State. All scholarships and bowl privileges have been restored and all of the Football Team and Joe Paterno wins were fully restored.
The NCAA was way out of line and got caught up in the dishonest media frenzy. The NCAA over-reacted and they had no evidence to justify their actions.
If anything, the media’s false attacks and their rush to injustice tend to parallel the media’s Global Warming hysteria, where multiple groups got sucked into the false and unsupportable claims.
The prosecutor in the case said that he had seen all of the information and there was no evidence of any coverup by Joe Paterno.
FWIW- The new NCAA guidelines, for what to do if an event gets presented to a manager, exactly parallel what Joe Paterno did at that time.

I wonder if anyone is investigating the crazy idea that cooling of the Arctic and of the rest of the world could be caused by global cooling, rather than global warming?
That the same influences that have caused cyclic warm and cold periods in the past, will *gasp* continue to do so in the future?
A radical idea, to be sure, and lacking the appeal of a one-size-fits-all, blame-it-on-the-devil-gas-CO2 theory that jams every possible scenario in one simple meme.
One thing about this new-fangled “CYA science”…the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

Let’s see if I have this right.
A warmer arctic region will slow the rate at which artic ocean waters cool. Which in turn will cause a slow down in the ocean currents. Which in turn will cause less heat to be brought to the arctic, which in turn will cause the arctic to cool and a new ice age will start.
These dudes just don’t understand how negative feedbacks work.
The slowdown in ocean currents, if it were to occur, would merely result in the arctic not warming as much as it otherwise would have. If the arctic were to cool as much as these fools predict, the resulting drop in sea temperatures would resurrect the ocean currents.

…and the fact that human beings for the first time ever are able to impact on that system.

Once again the hubris is staggering. The first time???
I guess whoever wrote that Climate gate email never heard of Atomic bombs. A nuclear war might just have a wee bit of impact on the system. Not to mention man-made bio weapons and viruses. The author probably also missed the part that every living organism, whether human, plant, fish, insect, or fowl has always had an impact on the system.
Maybe the hubris is so staggering because it is concentrated in the tiny bubble these scientists live in.

We have been impacting upon it since we started organised farming, probably 8-10,000 years ago, and seafaring maybe 5,000 years ago. The biggest impact to date has been the stripping of most forests for fuel and shipbuilding. At one time the UK was mostly dense forest.

I’m sitting at a desk (inside a building) situated on a glacial moraine which was covered by a mile thick ice cap a dozen, or so millennia ago. Thankfully, the glacier melted, though with no help from my primitive ancestors’ means of locomotion. Though the Younger Dryas might have interrupted the melting, a bit, there is evidence that world wide cooling was happening about the same time. So, if the Younger Dryas was world wide, where did the heat go? Into Trenberth’s deep Atlantic hot box, where today’s Global Warming is stored? Somehow, I don’t buy either story. If warming can be blamed as causing ice to melt, the explanation has to include credible evidence of what is warming up.

It was our ancestors in Europe riding on those Mastodons that caused the Ice Ages to end. You see, the beasts would be upset about the harness and would, like my ox team, protest by expelling digestive gases. This warmed up Europe and melted the glaciers. 🙂

It will be very funny when, 30 years from now, the europeans will start to migrate in Africa or Middle East and will leave the hundred of thousands of today emigrants freeze to death 🙂 So finally the europeans will be the first real “climate emigrants”

Uncle, uncle!!!! The laws of physics have been redefined! I just placed a pot of water over medium flame until boiling commenced. Turned the flame to high and the water froze solid! CAGW alarmist conclusion: first we bake and fry then we freeze to death! God (IPCC) help us all!! And to think I was going to abandon my relocation to a more stable climate somewhere on Mercury! Time to go!

Well, Mercury does have a far more stable and predictable climate, you got that right. You can choose between basking beside a lake of molten lead or enjoying the cool refreshment of 100 K that results from a lack of GHGs (or for that matter, any gases at all above a pretty hard vacuum) in a tidally locked planet. Heck, if you look along the terminator between light and dark side, you might even find a valley that stays pretty close to 300K!
Too bad about the lack of atmosphere, though. It’s strictly a bring your own ecology party.
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rgb, problem w/the 300K valley is that if you stood on a shadow line, half of you’d be at boiling lead, and the other half near absolute zero.
（ ´_⊃｀）(￣。￣)～ｚｚｚ(O.O)ᕙ(⇀‸↼‶)ᕗ(⊙︿⊙✿)’̿’\̵͇̿̿\=(•̪●)=/̵͇̿̿/’̿̿ ̿ ̿ ̿⊂•⊃_⊂•⊃( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)( ﾟ,_ゝﾟ)~(⊕⌢⊕)~

Maybe ocean currents will change and freeze Europe but it would be hard to pin that on human emissions given the data. I would like to present two papers. Paper #1 finds that surface temperature explains changes in atmospheric CO2 much better than human emissions do.http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2642639
Paper #2 finds that when uncertainty in the flows is taken into consideration in the IPCC AR5 carbon budget, it is no longer clear that rising atmospheric CO2 can be ascribed to human emissions.http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2654191
Taken together, the results imply that the relationship between anthropogenic emissions and changes in atmospheric CO2 that has been taken for granted in the theory of AGW is not supported by the data.

There is no doubt about it. We do not have a significant influence on atmospheric CO2. It is a temperature dependent process. But, few will be convinced of it until CO2 starts tracking downward with decreasing temperatures.

That indeed will be the test..
What we need to see over the next couple of decades is cooling at say 0.1degC per decade, and a return to say 1980s/1990s levels of CO2 notwithstanding BAU emissions between now and say 2035.
Of course, if this were to happen, warmists will argue that this is due to expanding carbon sinks (absorbing much more CO2 than man emits), and the reduced levels of CO2 explain the falling temperatures.
There is no winning in this game.
Perhaps a better scenario would be cooling temperatures and rising BAY emissions and rising atmospheric levels of CO2. That would cause the warmists more difficulties, but I consider that there is plenty of merit in the argument that CO2 is a response to temperatures such that if temperatures fall, one would expect some reduction in CO2 (less out gassing from the oceans).

“Of course, if this were to happen, warmists will argue that this is due to expanding carbon sinks (absorbing much more CO2 than man emits), and the reduced levels of CO2 explain the falling temperatures.”
That’s a little too much for a parrot to learn.
I think it will be “climate policy success” or just “climate success”.

Aha, the old “global warming causes cooling” shibboleth again. They do try and keep all the bases covered
The next thing we know, they’ll be blaming us for this horrid, cold summer we’ve been having – probably due to us having affected the jet stream with our profligate consumption, or some other such nonsense.
Actually, haven’t they already tried that one..?!

Someone on our local neighbourhood website firmly declared two days ago that CO2 affected the course of the jet stream. I was roundly abused when I asked ‘How?’. Thank heavens they no longer burn witches in England or I would be toast!

Yes indeed, the swivel-eyed global warming alarmists do NOT take kindly to being asked for an explanation which they cannot satisfactorily give!
A good one to ask them next time they’re banging on about it is: “Why was it so much warmer in medieval times than it is now – when vikings settled in Greenland, grew crops and livestock and buried their dead in thawed ground (which is now permafrost, of course)?”
‘Light the touchpaper and stand back’, as it were!

They seem to have abandoned the fact that cold is simply the absence of heat, not an energy of itself. Next there will be claims that energy of darkness is being amplified by human activities and we are harming the solar farms.

Well, I’m pretty sure the temperature in R’Lyeh is around 4 C, so endo or exo, he lies dreaming in the cold. Lovecraft no doubt found these temperatures (and those around the Mountains of Madness) horrifying, because he was hypersensitive to the cold and once collapsed because of a sudden temperature shift in a single day. He would have loved “global warming”, assuming that he or anybody else could detect it in their anecdotal life experience living in a single location. After all, the total global warming since 1850 is less than 1 C in all the anomaly models, and this 1 C has to be compared to an annual variation of perhaps 50 C throughout most of the temperate and polar regions, as well as year to year or day to day local variations much larger than this.
Or, we could express it in terms of latitude and growing zones. A growing zone in the US is defined to be a specific 10 F minimum temperature range. While there is a lot of topology in growing zone maps (which depend on e.g. height above sea level and location in the jet stream as much as on “strictly latitude”) on average a growing zone, a bit over 5 C, is perhaps 250 miles across north to south across the US. What we are talking about as all of the climate change that has occurred from 1850 to the present so far is the moral equivalent of moving from Goldsboro to Durham in NC. Goldsboro’s average temperature is 62.05°F. Durham’s is 59°F. Oops, that is too far — a shift of 1.7 C, almost twice the supposed climate shift since 1850, probably because Goldsboro is roughly 60 crow-flying miles closer to the coast than Durham, even though it is only maybe 30 miles further south. If we round our a list of nearby cities/airports: Raleigh NC (20 miles away) is 60.8°F or just about exactly 1 C warmer, RDU airport (in between is 60.45°F, Burlington (around 30 miles) is 59.6°F, Smithfield (40 miles) is 59.75°F (and located directly in between Raleigh and Goldsboro and yet it’s a full degree F cooler than Raleigh and well over 2 F cooler than Goldsboro, go figure).
People just don’t have any perspective on this. 0.7 C is pretty much exactly the total global anomaly from 1900 to the present. This is the scale of the climate shift that is supposedly going to wipe out whole species of (fill in your favorite small fluffy animal, pretty little wildflower, ecologically important insect, endangered freshwater clam, whatever) any year now. If I dig up a plant in my back yard and carry it to somebody’s yard in Raleigh, a twenty-five minute drive East, the plant will clearly suffer from the “climate shift”, and if I tried taking it to Goldsboro at 1.7 C warmer, that’s very close to the climate shift expected from a doubling of CO_2 alone with no feedback and could end up being the total anomaly shift by 2100 very easily indeed, even according to the IPCC, even if we do little to nothing about CO2.
Obviously, any plant or animal growing happily in my back yard is doomed if I drive it to Goldsboro and let it go or plant it there. The climate shift will be too severe! It will languish and die!
Right.
Most people — let’s try again — no human being alive could detect a climate difference between Durham and Raleigh, or Durham and Chapel Hill, or Durham and Smithfield, or even Durham and Goldsboro. They’re all in the same growing zone. On any given day, at any given hour, one or another of the these will be warmer or cooler than the others, and if we actually measured temperatures in the country — where I live, for example, as opposed to at the airport or at some downtown location — we might find that there is a 1 C shift from one part of Durham to another without even leaving the city limits. Azaleas dug up in Forest Hills are clearly doomed if they are transplanted to Loch’nora.
This is sheer lunacy. This is the “warming signal” that is supposedly being resolved by the process that produces the global anomaly, the climate shift we are all supposed to fear, the climate shift that will lead to mass extinctions and worse.
Or is it just climate noise?
That, my friends, is so very, very, difficult a question to answer. It is very difficult to answer now that the averages I’m reporting have been “adjusted” using techniques that deliberately smooth out the noise inherent in the direct measurements and supposedly correct for things like instrumentation changes or time of observation changes or location changes, each with a small pile of assumptions that are very difficult to retroactively go back and “prove” as the proof once again requires the separation of a presumed signal from unknown noise plus unknown natural variation. Goldsboro very likely does have a slightly different climate, as it is on the border between the piedmont and the coastal plain of NC, and is right at the tip of the “sandhills” region as well. Maps of NC precipitation show huge differences as one sweeps across these different geographical locations — the sandhills seem to favor thunderstorm formation relative to the piedmont, and the coastal plain gets a lot more than either one. There is a strong correlation between precipitation and elevation and surface topography and temperature even within a growing zone:http://climate.ncsu.edu/images/climate/sandhills_July_precip_big.jpg
(the red band outlines the Sandhills).
Climate models, of course, are blind to most of this. Cell sizes are typically at least 100×100 km, which could put Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Smithfield, and Goldsboro all in a single cell and assign that cell a single temperature, a single probability of generating a thunderstorm. But there is a two inch difference in the average July rainfall in Durham and in the Sandhills region only fifty miles south, or in Goldsboro sixty miles east by southeast. The cell size cannot even resolve the variations in rainfall and climate models, as far as I know, are completely blind to the variations in underlying soil types evidenced by this map:http://climate.ncsu.edu/images/climate/sandhills_soils_big.jpg
that are clearly correlated with the precipitation, surface albedo, heat transport variations associated with summer thunderstorms (which are further convolved with height above sea level and position in the general atmospheric circulation patterns and the state of the locally relevant decadal oscillation patterns and their phases, the AO and NAO):https://climate.ncsu.edu/climate/patterns/NAO.html
At a guess, natural shifts in almost any of these patterns can likely produce decadal or inter-climate-model-cell “climate” shifts as large or larger than any predicted to be “catastrophic”, shifts that naturally lead to floods or droughts or heat waves or cold snaps that are “extreme” compared to some sort of ill-defined running mean that “climate shift” is supposedly referred back to.
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Actually, all of this is very much like the novel ‘1984’ where the rulers ordered staff to constantly change the past to suit future predictions and alter the present to reflect desires not reality. This then happened faster and faster with the poor workers struggling to keep up with the multiple past/present/future alterations that all had to reflect each other’s reality while erasing anything that contradicted the New Reality Today.

More evidence that (1) climate models are crap and (2) climate modelers do not understand what drives ocean currents. More fodder for my book. Yippeeee!
To stop the Gulf Stream, the sun has to stop shining or the Earth has to stop rotating or both. That is, ocean currents are driven by the trade winds, which are caused by the rotation of the Earth and the surface temperature difference between the equatorial waters and those of the extratropics. That temperature difference between equatorial waters and those of the extratropics is of course caused by the sun shining more directly on the tropics than the extratropics.
Karl Wunsch of MIT addressed this more than 10 years ago in his letter to Nature is titled “Gulf Stream safe if wind blows and world turns”.http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/naturegulfstreamltr.pdf

Karl Wunsch of MIT addressed this more than 10 years ago in his letter to Nature is titled “Gulf Stream safe if wind blows and world turns”.

My first instinct was: Karl Wunsch must not be worried about his career. Yep. He retired a couple of years ago. wiki

emsnews says:
September 8, 2015 at 7:33 am
Actually, all of this is very much like the novel ‘1984’ where the rulers ordered staff to constantly change the past to suit future predictions and alter the present to reflect desires not reality.

It isn’t necessary to have the Ministry of Truth continually alter history. Noam Chomsky showed us in The Political Economy of Human Rights that conspiracies aren’t necessary. Folks will automatically self-censor. No young scientist would dare to write the letter that Prof. Wunsch wrote; it would be a ‘career-limiting-move’.

Exactly right Bob.
It also occurred to me that the sinning gyres of the ocean must have a fairly hefty amount of inertia, and will keep right on spinning for a while even if everything did coast to a stop and go dark.
Which makes me wonder if the authors thought that somehow the effects they dream up ( to call it hypothesizing would seem to give the notion too much credit), would happen rapidly, such that cause and effect could be readily discerned?
I mean, just inertia alone would seemingly cause considerable lag, so how would anyone know if changing ocean currents did not result from some long since passed influence?
This is, of course, one of the problems with just making stuff up…one never knows when to put a bow around the fantasy and call it a finished idea.

That is exactly right Bob. The Gulf Stream starts at the equator right next to Africa. It is not “pulled” north by sinking cold water in the Arctic, it is “pushed” west by the trade winds across the equatorial Atlantic, corralled by the continental shelf of the Americas and then pushed north by the mid-latitude westerly winds and the weight of all that other water being “pushed” in behind it from the equator.
The Gulf Stream slows down when the winds slow down and they won’t do that until the Earth no longer has an atmopshere and/or it stops spinning.
And the AMOC sinking water in the “north Atlantic” actually comes from the entire Arctic Ocean basin under the sea ice, not the north Atlantic next to Greenland.
These climate scientists should not be modelling the AMOC or the Gulf Stream if they do not even understand how they actually work. Real oceanographers need to speak up now and stop these people.

The other issue is that, during the Ice Ages when sea level was as much as 130 metres lower, the Gulf Stream had to take a different route outside of the Caribbean Islands, than it does today. A good ocean current needs about 200 metres of depth to flow properly.
The current Gulf Stream squeezes through the areas in this map which are at least 200 metres deep, after moving up the South American coast, it flows through the coast and the lesser Antilles Islands, then the point between Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula, then into the Gulf of Mexico where it often forms a loop, and then through the deeper channel between Florida and the Bahamas. It almost looks like the Gulf Stream has scoured its own channel deeper here.
In the ice ages, the ocean was too shallow or actually above sea level so that the Gulf Stream had to flow around the outside of all the Caribbean Islands. There may have been periods in the deglaciation/sea level rise period when the Gulf Stream made fleeting efforts to establish a new route through the Caribbean as it became deeper and this could have disrupted how it worked overall. Maybe the Younger Dryas is just one of those periods.http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/wiredscience/2011/01/572_20101103-OceanBathymetry-Labels-2000px-660×495.jpg

Perhaps the extra heat from co2 causes a runaway super convective cooling scenario and this whole thing should actually be called Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Freezing? One way or the other, we are screwed and us humans are the purveyors of this doom simply because there are government paid storytellers out there to ensure that the doom will be from heat, cold, or financial and societal destruction. Just has to be. Humans are bad.
/Yes…sarcasm. truth. Anger at idiots

Every paleo climatology book that discusses the Younger Dryas abrupt cooling event – the Younger Dryas is the name for a period 11,900 years ago when the planet when from interglacial warm to glacial cold with 70% of the cooling occurring in less than a decade and the cold period (during the Younger Dryas the North Atlantic ocean froze each winter to a latitude of Northern Spain and the ice sheets returned to North America, UK, and Northern Europe) lasting for 1200 years, asserts the cause of abrupt cooling is somehow related to a melt pulse which interrupts the ‘thermalhaline’ conveyor and stops the ‘Gulf Stream’. How many times have you heard that statement?
P.S.
The Younger Dryas occurred at a time when summer solar insolation at 65N was maximum. The theory that solar summer insolation at 65N has anything to do with why there is a 100,000 year glacial/interglacial cycle is also a Zombie theory.
Why are paleo climate books chock full of Zombie theories? Why do climate Zombie theories continue to be past down from generation to generation?
The first reason for the existence of the Zombie theories in paleo climate text books is there is a massive unknown forcing function (p.s. It is the sun.) that is causing what is observed, Zombie theories fill the void as scientists know there must be a physical explanation for cyclic (key observation, the abrupt climate change is cyclic not random and the abrupt climate changes correlate with abrupt changes to cosmogenic isotopes which indicates a major change to the sun is occurring) abrupt climate change.
The second reason for the Zombie theories is the climate wars. If the sun caused past cyclic abrupt climate change then it seems logical that the sun also caused the cyclic smaller slower changes to the planet’s climate such as the warming in the last 150 years.
There are three urban legends/Zombie theories connected with the Younger Dryas, the Gulf Stream, and cyclic abrupt climate change.
1a) The largest melt pulse in the Holocene, occurred a thousand years before the start of the Younger Dryas, there is no evidence that the largest melt pulse in the entire Holocene record caused any cooling. It has been known for at least a decade, that the largest melt pulse in the Holocene does not even correlate in time with the occurrence of the Younger Dryas, yet the interruption to the ‘Gulf Stream’ Zombie theory continues to live in the media and in silly papers.
1b) Ignoring paradox 1a) which should have been the stake through the heart/head of the Gulf Stream Zombie theory, the following is peer reviewed analysis and basic reasoning to kill the Gulf Stream Zombie theory.
Wally Broeker started the urban legend that a stoppage of the North Atlantic drift current has ‘part of the solution’ as to what caused the Younger Dryas. A hint that you are being told a Zombie theory in a paleo text book is the rhetoric statement ‘Zombie theory X’ is ‘part of the solution’ for what needs to be explained, followed by a hand waving explanation of the Zombie theory, and then a list of a half dozen paradoxes to disprove the Zombie theory.
(I kid you not. I can quote a list of Zombie theories from my paleo textbooks followed by observational paradoxes, from the same textbook, that disprove the zombie theory, if your are interested.)
Wally’s paper (I have a link to Wally’s papers if anyone is interested) includes no calculation of the magnitude of the heat carried by the North Atlantic drift current verses normal summer warming of the North Atlantic ocean. Wally just says there is a big change and an interruption to the Gulf stream could be part of the solution.
Seager et al’s 2002 paper does a basic calculation (which is support by a half dozen papers published 10 years before Seager’s paper, see link below, Seager notes his finding is not controversial and is the same reason why the northern west coast US states are 10 to 15C warmer than northern east coast US states) which quantifies the amount of warming that is due to North Atlantic drift current vs normal summer warming of the ocean. That basic calculation shows the majority of the heat transfer, the reason why Europe in the winter at latitudes above 60N is warmer than the east coast of the US is due to atmospheric transfer of heat, not due to ocean current transfer of heat.
A complete stoppage of the North Atlantic drift current (aka the ‘Gulf Stream’ which is also an urban legend) would only result in cooling of a few degrees in winter in Europe.
Stoppage of the Gulf Stream could not and did not cause the Younger Dryas abrupt cooling event. Stoppage of the Gulf stream could not and did not cause the 8200 years before present abrupt cooling event.
Reaction by a university geology professor after reading Seager’s paper.http://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2012/06/what-do-you-mean-the-gulf-stream-doesnt-keep-europe-warm-how-even-scientists-are-afflicted-by-urban-myths/

What do you mean, the Gulf Stream doesn’t keep Europe warmer than North America? How even scientists are afflicted by urban myths
This is how a scientific urban myth is born: by the time you reach a citation 3 times removed from the supporting observations, a conclusion becomes something ‘everyone knows’ despite very few people ever being exposed to the evidence it was based on. “I’m telling you, this paper told that paper that this other paper has compelling evidence for this! Compelling! Well no, I haven’t actually read it myself…”
I don’t believe this is a hugely common phenomenon. But science nowadays is such a vast body of knowledge that there are bound to be a few zombie ideas traipsing around in it, managing to survive because no-one has really properly examined them for a while. It is only when a scientist is inspired to chase one of these ideas back to its origin that they are brought into the light.

Stoppage of North Atlantic drift current is not ‘part of the solution’ of cyclic abrupt climate change. The abrupt cooling events are cyclic and have no explanation. The cyclic abrupt cooling events require a massive forcing function to cause the cyclic abrupt cooling. Big surprise there needs to be a physical explanation for what is observed. There are no magic amplification mechanisms that can appear when need to amplify tiny forcing changes and then disappear to explain why the massive short term forcing change caused by a super volcano eruption does not end an interglacial period or cause the planet’s climate to wildly oscillated.
2) The Discrete thermalhaline conveyor Zombie theory. There is no discrete ‘thermalhaline conveyor’ in the Atlantic to interrupt. Wally Broeker hypothesized the existence of a discrete thermalhaline conveyor with no proof (Wally’s paper includes a picture of the hypothesized discrete conveyor which is repeated ad infinitum.) A melt pulse will not stop the North Atlantic drift current as there is no discrete ‘thermalhaline current’ to interrupt. Data to support this comment will covered in the next comment.
3) Zombie theory ‘Tipping points’ or climate ‘jumps’ from one state to another. It is a fact that there is cyclic abrupt climate change in the paleo record. The Younger Dryas is an example of cyclic abrupt climate change. As the massive forcing mechanism that causes cyclic abrupt climate change is not known Wally Broeker also started the urban legend of ‘tipping points’ which has since morphed into the earth’s climate can jump from one state to another, with no explanation as to why the climate can ‘jump’.
Rocks do not occasionally jump up hill. Massive changes to the earth climate require a massive forcing change. More on the Zombie theory of ‘jumping’ climate states in another comment.
Jumping climate, infers a magical tipping point mechanism which will only when required amplify a tiny forcing as much as necessary and as long as necessary (Younger Dryas is 1200 years in duration, at a time when solar insolation at 65N was maximum) to ’cause’ the abrupt change of the earth’s climate.
If there was a massive positive amplification of forcing changes the planet could and would return to the glacial phase each time there was a major volcanic eruption, during the interglacial period. If there was positive feedback the planet’s temperature would wildly oscillate when there has a major eruption. That is not observed. (More peer reviewed papers and analysis to support the assertion that there is no magical tipping point amplification in later comments.)
2002 Paper that unequivocally shows that the a complete stoppage of the ‘Gulf Stream’ would only result in winter cooling of a few degrees in Northern Europe.http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~david/Gulf.pdf

Is the Gulf Stream responsible for Europe’s mild winters?
By R. SEAGER1¤, D. S. BATTISTI2, J. YIN2, N. GORDON1, N. NAIK1, A. C. CLEMENT3 and M. A. CANE1
Is the transport of heat northward by the Gulf Stream and North Atlantic Drift, and its subsequent release into the midlatitude westerlies, the reason why Europe’s winters are so much milder than those of eastern North America and other places at the same latitude? Here, it is shown that the principal cause of this temperature difference is advection by the mean winds. South-westerlies bring warm maritime air into Europe and north westerlies bring frigid continental air into north-eastern North America. Further, analysis of the ocean surface heat budget shows that the majority of the heat released during winter from the ocean to the atmosphere is accounted for by the seasonal release of heat previously absorbed and not by ocean heat-flux convergence. Therefore, the existence of the winter temperature contrast between western Europe and eastern North America does not require a dynamical ocean. ….
…In the current paper we demonstrate that transport of heat by the ocean has little influence on the contrast between the mild winters of western Europe south of 60±N and the harsh ones of eastern North America. North of 60±N the OHT accounts for about a quarter of the contrast by restricting winter sea-ice cover. The dominant cause of the contrast, at both latitudes, is atmospheric advection around the Icelandic Low and the simple maritime–continental climate distinction. The exact positioning and strength of the Icelandic Low is important to the climate contrast and is shown to be greatly influenced by the orographic forcing of the Rocky Mountains. Therefore, the difference in the winter climates arises fundamentally through atmospheric processes and the seasonal storage and release of heat by the ocean mixed layer. This is also all that is required to establish the difference in winter climates between the west coast of Europe and the west coast of North America at the same latitudes.
…Clearly, the atmosphere is doing the lion’s share of the poleward heat transport required to ameliorate climates at mid latitudes. This will be even more so in northern winter when the atmospheric heat transport is greater than its annual mean while the OHT appears to be less than its annual mean (see later)¤.
…The dominance of the atmosphere is far greater than earlier estimates (e.g. Peixoto and Oort 1992) which gave more weight to the ocean. Trenberth and Caron (2001) have compared their results to direct estimates in the ocean and those derived using an inverse method by Ganachaud and Wunsch (2000), and show that the NCEP-derived estimates fall within the error bars of those estimates in the subtropics while the ECMWF-derived estimates are clearly too low. North of 40±N, NCEP and ECMWF estimates agree with each other and with independent direct estimates. Interestingly, these recent estimates are in quantitative agreement with the early estimates of Houghton (1954) and Sverdrup (1957) as presented by Bjerknes (1964).

The Source of Europe’s Mild Climate
The notion that the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping Europe anomalously warm turns out to be a myth
But from what specialists have long known, I would expect that any slowdown in thermohaline circulation would have a noticeable but not catastrophic effect on climate. The temperature difference between Europe and Labrador should remain. Temperatures will not drop to ice-age levels, not even to the levels of the Little Ice Age, the relatively cold period that Europe suffered a few centuries ago. The North Atlantic will not freeze over, and English Channel ferries will not have to plow their way through sea ice. A slowdown in thermohaline circulation should bring on a cooling tendency of at most a few degrees across the North Atlantic—one that would most likely be overwhelmed by the warming caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. This moderating influence is indeed what the climate models show for the 21st century and what has been stated in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Instead of creating catastrophe in the North Atlantic region, a slowdown in thermohaline circulation would serve to mitigate the expected anthropogenic warming!

YES it is the sun doing this.
Secondly, the East Coast is cold because our weather comes straight out of the Arctic and Hudson Bay as the winter prevailing winds move from the cold continent mass towards the east while Europe gets the warmer ocean weather with the same prevailing winds.
So it can be way below zero in New York thanks to cold air over Canada while England rarely goes all that much below freezing at all.

This awful spin is because deep down they can’t get away from the likely continued cooling phase that will last up to 40 years. Younger dryas had km’s deep glacial ice over Canada and parts of USA and yet comparing this to something like now? If you are bad scientist why not just become a climate pseudo-scientist?
The Gulf stream never stops and continues to flow during the ice ages. Only difference is it flows less North and allows a circular polar ocean gyre to develop above it.
Any of these type of severe cooling events in future will have nothing to do with CO2, especially when it has no noticeable affect on oceans.

These two articles are proof that people who think they are climate scientists simply don’t read the literature nor do they do their homework. Had they bothered to read my article on the Arctic in 2011 [E&E 22(8) 1069-1083 (2011)] they could have avoided a number of errors they commit. First, bringing in Younger Dryas is non-sensical because it was very likely caused by a cosmic one-off event. Second, using climate models makes no sense because none of the models since Hansen introduced them have been able to predict anything correctly. Third, they are ignorant of Arctic temperature changes during the last 2000 years. Lets begin with known temperature history. Kaufman et al. [Science, 28 January, 2011] made a study of Arctic temperature changes based upon annual freezing and thawing of sediments in small lakes in Arctic borderlands that have preserve a datable temperature history. They had a four million dollar budget to produce a 2000 year temperature history based on these lake sediments. Their finding first of all was that for almost 2000 years there was nothing in the Arctic but slow, linear cooling, probably caused by a steady, orbitally driven reduction in summer insolation. This came to an end at the turn of the twentieth century when Arctic temperature suddenly turned up and decided to create a hockey stick feature. The resolution of their measurements was not sufficient to show what happened during the upturn but fortunately NOAA’s Arctic Report Card for 2010 has high resolution details. I showed it as figure 2 in my article. The Arctic temperature in the twentieth century has three sections. The century starts with a linear temperature rise from 1900 to 1940, This is followed with linear cooling from 1940 to 1970, after which warming resumes.We are aware that there have been reports of Arctic cooling in the early part of our century but none of those reports go back before 1970. Hence, none of these numerous reports give you any idea of what really is happening in the Arctic. The biggest thing that happened in the twentieth century was a sudden temperature rise at the start of the century. It is quite certain that it cannot be caused by greenhouse warming. To start a greenhouse warming from scratch you must inject a substantial amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we know that this did not happen. The only possible explanation of this sudden temperature change is a sudden change in the pattern of North Atlantic Ocean currents. This is the only way you can quickly swing a large amount of warm water into the Arctic Ocean. The cooling incident in mid-century could then be understood as a temporary return of the former flow pattern of currents. Bearing in mind that what has happened in nature can happen again we ask the question: is it possible for such a cooling incident to happen again? I would say yes but I cannot say hen. In view of the fact these guys are reporting possible cooling it is not impossible that another such cooling could be upon us. Whether or not the same phenomenon is at work we don’t know. It would be nice to know now what the currents in the North Atlantic have been doing but I doubt that any of those climate “scientists” were interested, what with the oceans ready to swallow up our cities and an ice age on the way.

I seem to recall reading a WUWT article on this within the last 2 months which presented the case for a ‘cosmic event’? I haven’t checked, so I could be mistaken.
There is some evidence, but like all evidence based upon proxies, one needs to be extremely cautious. best taken with a pinch of salt.

No evidence at all that space impacts caused any of the severe cooling events in the past over thousands of years. The Younger Dryas warmed numerous times during it and a impact would only affect climate while dust was in the atmosphere. A few years later temperatures would be back to normal.

Odd celestial events do effect the sun..
The sun isn’t stationary. It moves around our galaxy as do all the stars and dust and junk. The sun is in an outer arm but it moves in and out of other space stuff depending on what is agitated by the galactic movement caused by the HUGE thing that exists at the center of our little galaxy and which is nearly entirely hidden by thick veils of interstellar dust.
All this causes the sun to be more active or quieter depending on what neighboring stars/entities/dust is around our planet’s passage at any given time.

“A slowdown of the ocean circulation is a double-edged sword,” said Jud Partin, the lead author and a research associate at the University of Texas Institute of Geophysics. “If we see some temperature changes associated with it . . . and somehow are quick to act and alleviate the change, then we have the potential to stop it.”

It is difficult to fathom the idiocy contained in such a statement. I can only assume that these people are morons, since what they say is so beyond the pale of even common sense. There is no getting around it; the idea that we can control the earth’s temperature, up or down, is moronic.

They declared years ago that the sun has zero effect on the climate. This lunacy is Medieval Science, not modern science. All the great scientists like Dr. Hubble and my grandfather who studied the sun in the past are rolling in their graves.

Soon we will have an upside down cooling hockey stick that we are guilty of. All I can hope for is that the idiotic studies being stuffed into journals in the last-chance Paris climate bacchanalia can be seen by ordinary people to be garbage. Mark Steyn, who is laying the hockey stick belatedly to rest and possibly global warming next to it, with his book on “A Disgrace to the Profession…Mann Hockeystic..” hopefully will also find time, perhaps after the ‘Trial of the Century’, to chronicle the death throes of Climate Science as we’ve come to know it.
The broad ‘outing’ of scientists who had been officially silent on the Mann and hockey stick criminatological research will embolden them, free them and bring others out into the light on broader issues in this and other blots on the sciences. The ‘clime syndicate’ (M. Steyn’s creation) has been able to resist sceptical pressures by circling the wagons and smearing and sniping. There will henceforth be less appetite for this among those with some scruples who have been quietly loathing themselves for being fearful and silent. If you didn’t yet buy the ‘book’ that has brought all this to a head, by all means do so and you will not only be informed and entertained but you will be helping save freedom, free speech and democracy at the same time.

The ultimate achievement of advocacy science is to preserve and extend classical definitions of science with a synthetic science that recognizes all the the cycles of nature but with an advocacy-policy stamp on all aspects therein. With enough grants and supercomputers it can eventually explain individual behaviors and even orbital dynamics.

CAGW alarmists are simply creating ad hoc excuses to obfuscate the complete and utter failure of their cargo cult.
There hasn’t been a global warming trend in almost two decades, the weakest solar cycle since 1906 is currently in effect, the 30-yr PDO cool cycle started in 2008, the 30-yr AMO cool cycle starts around 2020 (which will accelerate Arctic Ice recovery), Arctic Ice extents have been recovering since 2007, the Antarctic ice extents have been growing for 36 years and set a record last year, the next solar cycle is expected to be the weakest since the Maunder Minimum started in 1645 and there may be a Grand Solar Minimum for the next 80 years, which may cause over 1C of global cooling by 2100.
CAGW alarmists will continue to fiddle with the raw data and make bizarre excuses to keep the CAGW grant train chugging along for as long as possible, but the train is already in the ditch.
CAGW nas become a joke.

” the possibility that global warming could slow or shut down the Atlantic’s great ocean circulation systems, with dramatic implications for North America and Europe.”
This is a dead giveaway of another attempt to tie any possible climate change that the alarmist had not predicted to tie it again to global warming. More alarmist propaganda . The climate will cool during the next 20-30 years but not due to global warming

Zombie theory 2: There is no water discrete deep water thermalhaline conveyor to interrupt.
Changes in the North Atlantic drift current cannot therefore cause cooling at the equator. Come on man, these Zombie theories are ridiculous.
Ocean probe data indicates there is no discrete North Atlantic thermalhaline conveyor. The cold dense high latitude water, falls and is then distributed locally in the deep ocean. Only 8% follows the path of the hypothesized conveyor route. There is no discrete thermalhaline conveyor in the North Atlantic to be interrupted.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090513130942.htm

Cold Water Ocean Circulation Doesn’t Work As Expected
The familiar model of Atlantic ocean currents that shows a discrete “conveyor belt” of deep, cold water flowing southward from the Labrador Sea is probably all wet.
A 50-year-old model of ocean currents had shown this southbound subsurface flow of cold water forming a continuous loop with the familiar northbound flow of warm water on the surface, called the Gulf Stream.
To address those criticisms, Lozier and Bower launched 76 special Range and Fixing of Sound floats into the current south of the Labrador Sea between 2003 and 2006. Those “RAFOS” floats could stay submerged at 700 or 1,500 meters depth and still communicate their data for a range of about 1,000 kilometers using a network of special low frequency and amplitude seismic signals.
But only 8 percent of the RAFOS floats’ followed the conveyor belt of the Deep Western Boundary Current, according to the Nature report. About 75 percent of them “escaped” that coast-hugging deep underwater pathway and instead drifted into the open ocean by the time they rounded the southern tail of the Grand Banks.
Eight percent “is a remarkably low number in light of the expectation that the DWBC is the dominant pathway for Labrador Sea Water,” the researchers wrote.
“Everybody always thought this deep flow operated like a conveyor belt, (William: The data indicates there is no discrete conveyor, why then does every text book and paper continue to discuss a ‘conveyor’ without proof, it’s a Zombie theory) but what we are saying is that concept doesn’t hold anymore,” said Duke oceanographer Susan Lozier. “So it’s going to be more difficult to measure these climate change signals in the deep ocean.”

Zombie unwitting footsoldiers of CAGW like William Astley believe the climate to also be zombie-like, passive, dead. Any climate change has to come from brute forcing, right? Either CO2 or astrophysical cycle-de-jour, but that’s a minor detail. You’re basically on the same side.
The climate debate is not between CO2 and the rest. Its between passive climate (CO2, solar, magnetic astrophysical brute forcing etc.) or active internally dynamic climate. To change, does it need brute forcing from outside? Or as a dynamic system does it change itself?
If the deep ocean was passive and static as you believe, then it would be anoxic. Like the Black Sea is, which is enclosed. That’s why it’s called the Black Sea. But its not, it is oxygenated. This is because deep water is flowing. If water flows, it follows that it flows somewhere. The ThermoHaline Circulation is no myth, and if it turns out to be much more complex than previously thought, this only underlines further the role of nonlinear chaotic dynamics in driving ocean circulation and making the 97% of climate that lies in the ocean chaotically unstable. That’s where climate change comes from. Not CO2, or the stars.

It seems to me that we’re going to have to pay either way.
First we paid for the generation of vast quantities of heavily biased alarmist drivel, all requiring sending overpaid kagool-clad nitwits on missions to drill holes in trees, slice up stalactites and dig up detritus from the bottom of caves.
Then we paid for the subsidy driven astronomically priced market disrupting non-solution.
And now we will have to pay for “experts” to slowly discover that things are not in all cases quite as urgent or alarming as we may have thought.
Whilst we will know, that the official retraction will be basically a rehash of the extensive work of currently sidelined critics, such as Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Snr, John Christy, Lindzen, McIntyre and McKitrick, Lomborg,
Not to mention, yours truly and the hyper-intelligent contributors to this blog.
However we will doubtless have to shell out more money for more boring boring.
Of trees and ice cores, etc.
We’ll probably also be charged for the removal of all the then defunct wind turbines rusting in the sea on Dogger Bank.
We’re even paying for the output of Lewandowsky.
Both in terms of taxes and in terms of corrosion of the soul.

Nor normally if your claims are based on things getting warming , that fact it is getting colder or no getting warming would invalidate your claims . However such is the ‘magic’ of CAGW anything , including that which is in total contrast to your claims , is ‘proof ‘ supporting your claim.
Once again let is remember that one of the great unanswered question that comes out of this whole thing is ,what would disprove CAGW? it is situation like this that tells us why this question remains unanswered.

Europe’s mild climate has little to do with North Atlantic Drift and has far more to with the mild Westerly winds coming from the mid Atlantic. Why does so called climate experts still go along with this myth about the North Atlantic Drift. Do these people ever look at the weather records for europe and see that for climate cooling in europe. You need high pressure blocking off the mild Westerly winds during the winter months followed by a more zonal southern tracking jet stream during the summer months.

The difference between mild European climate now and the ice age one is down to change in movement of the AMOC directly from the Arctic ocean basin. It is wind and density driven and if the sinking is lost the AMOC will slow greatly and be forced South with significant movement of deep cold Arctic ocean water. This causes a deep water polar ocean gyre to form across the North Atlantic to Spain and then move North towards the Nordic seas against the UK. It is prevented from moving any further South by the Gulf stream and wind currents, which instead causes a southern based NAD towards southern Spain.
The main unknown it was causes this to happen? A change in the Arctic ocean basin and/or weakened density flow of the current from the South, enabling this surge of Arctic Ocean basin water much further South.

As have suggested in other posts l feel that the Oceans role in major climate change is overstated.
l believe that the formation of the ice age was largely weather driven. Why! because l can’t see how the ice sheets would have been able to extend to the rate they did if the weather had been as changeable during the ice age as it is now. For the ice sheets to extend as far as they did, would need the weather to be doing more or less the same thing over a large number of years.

All weather over the planet it dictated by ocean/seas. You can’t have a ice age largely weather driven without ocean influence. The post with the description about how ice ages form was based on scientific observations using ocean proxies, not just a educated guess. Snowfall has to come from the oceans to build up the glaciers during ice ages. Currently the ocean in the North Atlantic is by far not cold enough to deliver this, no matter how wind driven they become.
They need a different mechanism like the one described previously. The change in air temperatures from weather have virtually no influence on the North Atlantic Ocean. Quick changes from inter-glacial to ice ages in decades or less can only occur with a ocean circulation change. The circulation change can give deep very cold water in the North Atlantic in just months. This ocean change gives the snowy weather around Europe and USA that leads to huge glaciers.

Here is a little experiment for y’all to try. Ask every non scientist you speak with on a casual basis at an appropriate point in any conversation, particularly if climate change or global warming comes up, what percent they think CO2 is of our atmosphere. I usually get an answer of 20 to 30%. That even includes some who are somewhat scientifically educated, like one friend who has a masters degree in geology!
My point is that the propaganda has been pushed for so long and so hard that it will be very difficult to counter it. The studies referenced here are excellent examples of how this has happened. When I tell folks that CO2 is .04%, four one hundreths of one percent, of our atmosphere it sometimes opens their minds a little to the fact that they are being lied to.

The oxygen released by plants comes from the water they take in, not from the carbon dioxide in the air. Also, O2 stays in the air longer than CO2.
Plus, half of biologically produced oxygen in the atmosphere comes from phytoplankton in the oceans. The concentration of CO2 varies both above and below the supposedly “well-mixed” 400 ppm in the air.

The Younger Dryas is a boon for alarmists because it was a real event, it happened very quickly (certainly in less than a century and maybe less than a decade) and it lasted for about 1,000 years and the European climate became very cold and dry for those 1,000 years.. And one of the hypotheses about the cause of the YD involves rapid discharge of fresh water from melting of the North American ice sheet, which had supposedly been impounded in Lake Agassiz until the ice barrier finally melted. This fresh water coming out of the St Lawrence (the theory goes, and it’s quite convincing) spread out across the surface of the North Atlantic, blocking off the warm Gulf Stream waters from keeping western Europe’s climate mild.
This theory relies on the YD being a strictly European event, but it probably wasn’t. Some sources now say that the YD was at least Northern Hemisphere-wide, if not world-wide. Maybe the fresh water influx temporarily halted the worldwide thermohaline circulation, which might have affected global climate? It’s all a bit iffy though.
Anyway, climate models “prove” that the Greenland ice cap will melt, hence (the argument goes) replicating the fresh water influx into the Atlantic and thereby causing another YD. That’s the scare story. It has enough plausibility, because of the real, historical YD, that it could gain more traction than “we’re all going to fry next year”. Last month there was a WUWT article about it and it didn’t fare very well in the discussion.
One problem with the Lake Agassiz theory is that Lake Agassiz probably did its maximum emptying at around 9,500 years BP, according to Geological Survey of Canada estimates, which is about 2,000 years after the end of the YD. After that, it probably became an inland sea without an outlet through the St Lawrence (and maybe without any outlet until it finally discharged to the north).
Other theories for the cause of the YD involve a cosmic event, or a decrease in solar radiation. Trouble is, you can’t blame those on fossil fuels.
Like most natural phenomena, the YD is a complex event without a single, totally convincing explanation, so I’m not losing sleep over it happening again soon.
And what was the cause of the Older Dryas? This is not addressed by the Lake Agassiz theory.

There is no valid evidence for a cosmic event. The YD was no different from the many such events which preceded it, both in the last deglaciation and previous ones.
Lake Agassiz existed in various forms for about 4000 years. It originally drained south, down the Mississippi, then toward the NW, and finally toward the east.
IMO there are plenty of other deglaciation events producing meltwater pulses besides Lake Agassiz to explain the Dryases and the 8200 years ago sudden cold snap. Among these are ice shelf collapse, the separation of the Cordilleran from the Laurentide ice sheets and the separation of the Baffin and Labrador ice domes around Hudson Bay.

The idea that the Gulf stream shuts down is wrong as it is still in operation during ice ages. Whether it has been incorrectly worded or not I don’t know. The fact is the Europe is milder than across Canadian side is due to warmer ocean water tracking North towards the Nordic seas. These are wind driven in a westerly movement, but also ocean driven in a northerly movement towards the poles.
The chart below easily shows this below. If the winds just blow westerly with no ocean movement north then temperatures around the Canadian side would be similar on the eastern side. The warmer temperatures go all way up to the Arctic so it defiantly shows a warmer ocean current that wouldn’t be there without a northward push.http://weather.unisys.com/archive/sst/sst-150906.gif

Sounds arrogant, but ‘I told you so’. Looking back on pre-history is some indication of the cyclical patterns of ice and warm periods, and we don’t know exactly in terms of years how long these lasted. We do know from studies ice has dominated over warm periods in the last 2 million years. Most interstadial or interglacial have lasted for around 15,000k on parts of the planet.. But – the last 10,000 k have seen adaptation from a hunter, gatherer and fisher economy to agriculturalists and advanced industralized civilizations. Population has grown in some parts of the world caused by our ability to drop the hunter and gatherer mentality and build territories.and release some of our populations to become artisans. We exploit natural resources but the most important to us is rain. Without that we lose plants. Ice ages caused less rain. It is strange but the Northern Hemisphere without doubt suffered from more glacial presence than the Southern Hemisphere. Incredible that the Antarctic didn’t do more towards this, it was the Arctic that stopped the Gulf Stream that caused the Northern Hemisphere to freeze although the ice sheets didn’t advance to Africa or some parts of the Southern parts of Asia Minor and Europe. High peaks of course everywhere lost some tree cover, particularly rain forests in Australia. I don’t think we will see a glacial advancement like in the Day after Tomorrow but it may come one day. Our orbit around the sun will definitely play a big part in this too. But don’t throw your Ugg boots out yet. But – this should not stop us thinking about pollution of our cities and landscapes. But – it will help us survive in a better natural environment.

Lets get this straight. Global warming leads to northern hemisphere cooling, maybe causing an ice age which will cause cooling generally?
1. Is this an explanation to be used if global cooling starts?
2. Will the consequential cooling then restore the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation so the warming cycle can start again?
Too much for my brain:(
Cheers
Rogerhttp://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com

So the Alfred Wegener Institute releases a ‘Day after Tomorrow’ computer game.
____
MarkW signals end of game in 3 sentences:
The slowdown in ocean currents, if it were to occur, would merely result in the arctic not warming as much as it otherwise would have. If the arctic were to cool as much as these fools predict, the resulting drop in sea temperatures would resurrect the ocean currents.
Sure the AWI should consult MW before typing into keyboards.
In Alfred Wegeners Name.
Regards – Hans

This reminds me of dirt pudding. Dirt pudding has the odd appearance of dirt on the top made up of crushed oreo cookies (with white maggots due some of the creamy center that didn’t get completely scraped off).
Mixing up a model recipe with a cup of this and a cup of that and then saying the ice age cometh is like feeding you dirt pudding while trying to convince you that the crushed oreos are indeed real dirt.

I get this overwhelming feeling of psychics at work. Make one million predictions and surely a few of them will occur, then pounce on it and take full credit. Science has once again become a bunch of “cold callers” who act like superstitious witches cackling around a pot. These people are ruining science.

Global cooling will follow global warming, and vice versa, continually in fractal oscillation as it always has. This includes ice ages from time to time – big changes rarely, small changes frequently, i.e. fractal pattern (signature of chaotic-nonlinear dynamics).

My car needs new tires and a tuneup (and an oil change). My pickup needs a massive overhaul or I need a new pickup. House could use some work and new furnace would be nice, since last winter’s climate change was a little short on global warming… Can somebody point to the climate change fixit button? It seems it can do EVERYTHING, so those little things should be no challenge.

I wonder to what extent the current flow to Europe from North America isn’t due to water but the fact that the Earth spins and it’s Europe moving west while the water lags? Anyone have any ideas on that?

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